Tagged Questions

I made this nice backup system to turn drives into vdi's and put them on our network share.
Then the next day my boss walks in with 20 new machines to replace our old ones, they have 2TB drives. How ...

So, long story short.
* I had a 5.5TB RAID5 array with a HP controller.
* HP uses a really, really painful RAID5 algorithm (ref: Delayed Parity)
* I wrote a new block driver that translates requests ...

My arch Linux system does not recognize neither the partition nor the hard disk in which it is installed. it is installed on /dev/sdb1 but it recognizes that as /dev/sdc1 and the initialization goes ...

Consider a 100MB raw block device as a simple example. That is 204800 blocks of 512 bytes each for a total of 102760448 bytes.
The challenge is to shift the first 98MB (200704 blocks) so there is a ...

I want to limit the write speed and limit to specify directory.
Make this directory flakey.
Make this directory error for can't write data to it.
I have user dmsetup to create the device mapper with ...

I'm not sure what I should be googling or if FUSE does this (I suspect not). I'd like to create a virtual block device which all access (such as reads/writes) go to my app.
I know I can have a file ...

I have a (read-only, commercial, dual-layer) DVD which I’m trying to create a backup copy of on my computer (because DVDs can be damaged). However, when I try to determine the size of the disc, I get ...

I use dd a lot. I live in a contant fear of making a mistake one day, for example writing on sda (computer disk) instead of sdb (USB disk) and then erasing everything I have on my computer.
I know dd ...

When I need to run a program with direct disk access, like read/write from /dev/sdb, I simply add the user to 'disk' group. In this way we don't need to disclose the root account the the user. However ...

I am trying to bound corruption in a block-based disk format in the presence of plausible machine failures in a Linux-specific application. That is, the file is read and written in application-defined ...

I am using SUSE 11SP3 and formatted the devices with a block size of 4KB using mkfs.ext3.
/sys/block/sda/queue/logical_block_size and /sys/block/sda/queue/physical_block_size show the OS is using 512 ...

For the purpose of backups, I'd like to transfer (several) whole disk partitions over an ssh link. So the source is a block special device, and the target should be a regular file. Common tools seem ...

I was watching this Defcon video and around 4:30 he shows a custom pattern of drive wiping — the drive is filled with a constant text pattern.
Whether he is joking or not, is this possible? How would ...

I have a hard drive in a USB enclosure that I am doing some data recovery on. The drive is in extremely bad shape and frequently resets on reads.
The device registers as /dev/sdb. Sometimes, probably ...

I guess this is not a big problem, still I can't see what's the matter.
I'm building Images for an Embedded Linux (2.6.39) ARM9 System with Buildroot 2013.11, which is booting from an SD card. I was ...

I know how to use the libblkid library to analyze existing block devices. I'd like to use it to analyze a memory extent before I write it to the block device. Something like that:
char block[4096];
...

I'm trying to use the libblkid library to analyze various filesystems on a block device from a C/C++ program, and it works well. However I'm confused with the blkid_superblocks_get_name function from ...

Is it possible to export a block device such as a DVD or CDROM and make it so that it's mountable on another computer as a block device?
NOTE: I'm not interested in doing this using NFS or Samba, I ...

I've got a RAID 10 arrays on a couple of KVM host machines. The RAID 10 array is one big VG. I usually create a small LV for guest disk image storage then the rest of the VG I carve out as LVs to add ...

Is there a method of slowing down the copy process on Linux?
I have a big file, say 10GB, and I'd like to copy it to another directory, but I don't want to copy it with full speed. Let's say I'd like ...

I want to know what the easiest way is to determine (without root privilege) whether a block device (say sdb) or any part of it is mounted (and which part of it).
Checking /proc/mounts for sdb is not ...

I want to understand the I/O pattern a database is writing to disk to decide how many disks to use for best performance. To analyse the I/O pattern I want to use blktrace and I have to grok it first. ...